The 5 Most Half-Assed Monsters in Movie History

You wouldn't think it would be that hard to come up with a movie monster. You just take what people are already afraid of, and make it either bigger, stronger or uglier. People are scared of crime, so you make a movie about a super-strong killer with a messed-up face behind a hockey mask. Boom. Collect your money.

But some writers seem to struggle with this concept. Badly. So, you wind up with movies like...

#5.
The Gingerdead Man

The Monster:

Pastry.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

Six words: Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man. Picture it: Busey dressed up in a gingerbread man costume, hacking, slashing and making pastry-based puns along the way. You can't imagine the amount of money we would have paid to see that. Actually, you probably could have imagined it (it's four dollars).


"I don't know where I am right now!"

Why it Wasn't

Well Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man, kind of. Gary only appears in the movie's first five minutes as the world's worst robber: He enters a diner, riffles through the cash register but takes no money, shoots people instead, gets caught and, in the end, is sent to the electric chair. So what we get from then on is a very, very shitty puppet voiced by Gary Busey.

And to transform Gary Busey into said puppet, we have to take one hell of a deus ex machina roller coaster: Busey's corpse is cremated and then his evil mom mixes the ashes into a gingerbread mix which she delivers to a local bakery. There, a worker accidentally cuts himself and bleeds a gallon of blood over the mixture that he bakes anyway, and then the oven is hit with a power surge causing the mixture to turn into the Gingerdead Man.

Not all that realistic, according to the experts we talked to.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

Allow us to take you to the film's climatic showdown (WARNING: SPOILERS!). We see Gingerdead Man's absolute failure as a movie monster demonstrated:

In order for him to be scary, they had to arm him with a revolver.

Though we do have to agree this was probably the only ending possible ("Why don't we just have one of the good guys eat him?"). Still, when you use "Got Milk" as a pithy bon mot in your screenplay, you officially must turn in your Writer's Guild Card. It's true, look it up.

#4.
Death Bed: The Bed That Eats

The Monster:

Yes, a bed that eats people.

Why it Could Have Been Scary

Successful horror often makes us afraid of everyday, mundane things. Jaws brought terror to swimming in the ocean. The Blair Witch Project spooked us out of any future camping trips. The Ring exploited our natural fear of wet children. So the people behind Death Bed must have thought, "What's something people do every day? Sleep! Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. It's like Hannibal Lecter meets IKEA. Bang, done. Someone pass the cocaine."

Why it Wasn't

To capture its prey, the bed possesses all the wily powers of, well, a bed: cuddliness, soft pillows and 1,000 thread count sheets. Luckily for the ravenous bed, a bevy of horny, and somewhat unattractive, youngsters come upon its spooky old mansion and say, "See that run-down, abandoned mansion stinking with the smells of death and demonic digestive juices? We should totally FUCK in there!"

And there is nothing that gives the murderous bed the munchies like a couple of hormonal kids doing it right on top of him. Can you blame him? His food of choice is fornicating right on his face. Imagine a Whopper giving a blow job to a corn dog on your face, and see if you don't get a little peckish.

You'd think all these randy teens would stop going to the house, where all their horny friends don't return from, and check into a motel instead. But let's face it; getting eaten by a bed is still more appealing than lying down on a urine-soaked Motel 6 mattress.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

Knives cannot defeat it! After the guy strikes the bed, we're treated to the slowest, dullest sequence in horror film history. There is some very subtle acting going on here, and by "subtle" we mean "almost comatose." At the sight of his dissolved hands, the "actor" summons up all the emotional devastation of a guy who just realized the pizza delivery man forgot the crazy bread.


"Oh no, not my favorite hands!"

If that wasn't enough Death Bed for you, feel free to enjoy this clip, in which two guys and one awesome mustache get attacked by a deck of playing cards, and then shoot themselves in the crotch repeatedly with a pistol. In a movie called Death Bed, it probably makes total sense in context.

#3.
The Mangler

The Monster:

A laundry folding machine.

Why It Could Have Been Scary

The Mangler is based on a Stephen King short story, and everybody loves Stephen King. Maybe too much; there was a long stretch in King's career where he'd just shit into a fax machine and send it to his publisher with a note reading, "Print this!"

And they did. And then Hollywood filmed the shit Stephen shat.


"Hey, stay on the line, I'm about to pinch off another bestseller."

That was the case with The Mangler, a tale that appeared in one of King's collections of short stories. As in, this was one of those ideas even he didn't think could be stretched into a whole novel. Kind of makes you wonder why...

Why it Isn't Scary

In the film, you have to actually feed yourself to the demonically possessed laundry folding machine. It doesn't sneak into your house, it doesn't tail you in a car and it doesn't creep up on you while you're having sex with your girlfriend in the woods. Quite simply, you must give the Mangler permission to kill you by inserting yourself into the machine.

That's not a monster, that's a pretty standard laundry folding machine. There are far more scary industrial machines that exist in the real world, like metal presses and lumber claws. You know 118 lumberjacks per 100,000 die every year, and lumberjacking equipment isn't even demonically possessed. By our count, the Mangler only takes out a few rather pointless lives. Hey Mangler, call us when you grow a pair of nuts.

Most Pathetic Attempt at Horror

Watch as a middle-aged woman sticks her hand into the Mangler's mouth, over and over, taunting it.

The way we figure, the lady was asking for it. Good news: She's totally eligible for workers comp. Bad news: She's the size and shape of a t-shirt. As for the insane old man on the catwalk? The one with robot legs? We think he just wandered in from a different movie.